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“She’s very active, she’s a thumb-sucker clearly,” said Bailee Hoops, Heaven’s mother.

She has always been a thumb-sucker, and as school years came around, we expected she would wean off it.

Now, I’ll admit, it’s a habit I don’t love, and he’s far from the only adult thumb-sucker I know, but I wouldn’t think twice about it except he does it all the time, in meetings, in front of clients, all of that.

But I’m not seeking to fulfill the tradition of the Thanksgiving Day journalistic thumb-sucker by telling you that we should all be grateful not to be the worst country in the history of the world, or that we should celebrate the good kind of patriotism, as epitomized by Martin Luther King Jr. or Bruce Springsteen or whomever, and reject the bad.

Nor am I a knuckle-cracker, a nail-biter, or a thumb-sucker.